Bad grammar and metalinguistic awareness in the age of social media

Traditionally, written language is associated with time for planning, revising, and editing, resulting in texts with a clear beginning, middle, and end, also using complete sentences. However, the arrival of digital media has blurred the distinction between spoken and written language, and in industrial countries writing has overtaken reading as the basis of speakers’ daily experience of literacy (Brandt 2015). This does not mean that the traditional patterns of writing have become more entrenched. Digital media have brought about a new kind of writing, writing that is medially written, conceptually oral, and technically digital, employing non-verbal strategies to mark topics (e.g., with hashtags) or express stance (e.g., through icons with names like “shruggie”). Even though empirical studies have shown that extensive texting may actually contribute to children’s awareness of syntactic structures and overall literacy, many people, especially educators, are concerned that the use of “netspeak” or “text speak”, with its many abbreviations, unconventional spelling, and reliance on emojis, will affect speakers’ ability to craft complex arguments and will make the notion of “proper grammar” obsolete. The video “Word Crimes” (by “Weird Al” Yankovic), which suggests that speakers who can’t write “the proper way” deserve to be mocked, has been watched over 35 million times. People are as interested in what counts as “bad grammar” as ever, but linguists usually brush off the subject as irrelevant, trotting out the same old examples with a high density of modifiers and few markers of interpersonal discourse.

(Available: https://biclce2017.files.wordpress.com. Anja Wanner. University of Wisconsin-Madison. Adapted.)